Effect of dependency distance of source text on disfluencies in interpreting
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Xinlei Jiang [1] ; Yue Jiang [1]
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[1] Xi⿿an Jiaotong University
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- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 243, 2020
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Assessing task difficulty or cognitive load imposed on interpreters is crucial for interpreting pedagogy, accreditation and research. Reliable and accurate quantifiable measurement of source text difficulty is thus required. Dependency distance, the linear distance between two syntactically related words in a sentence, as an index reflecting syntactic complexity, is widely used in quantitative linguistics. To verify maximum dependency distance (Max DD) as an effective indicator for predicting task difficulty of interpreting, this study investigated the influence of Max DD of source text on interpreters⿿ disfluencies (DF), and the moderating effect of different dependency relations. Twenty postgraduates did English-Chinese sight interpreting of thirty sentences comprising fifteen long Max DD sentences (beyond the short-term memory span) and fifteen short sentences (within memory span). Results show that: (i) long Max DD sentences yield significantly more DF than short sentences; (ii) the discrepancies manifest themselves distinctively in terms of different dependency relations. For shared syntactic structures, DF occur significantly or moderately more frequently in long Max DD sentences than in short sentences, whereas for non-shared structures, DF show no significant difference. This study is the first to apply dependency distance to prior estimates of interpreting task difficulty and indicates its potential for interpreting studies.
